UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hey there!

I try to use 'find' to remove empty directories like this:

Code:

find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rm -rf {} ';'

It works just fine, but there are some directories i want to exclude.
So i tried to do sth like this:

Code:

find . -depth -type d -empty -exec grep -v "not this one please" -exec rm -rf {} ';'

but this isn't working.

How can i include the 'grep -v' to achieve this?

Code:

find . -depth -type d -empty -print |
grep -v "not this one please" |
xargs rmdir

If you have newlines or other tricky stuff in your path names, you need to take some additional precautions, but let's assume you don't.

To grep for more than one thing at the same time, egrep is helpful.

Code:

egrep -v 'not this one|or this one|nor this one either|neither this'

Thanks that did the trick.
Also thank you for the egrep additional tip!

I have to bump this thread, .. expanding the original question.

Let's say I want to search for folders that are empty, but are also declared as empty despite if there are dot-files (.gnome, .kde, etc.). So dot-files are ignored, only visible files are important. So basically what I want to achieve is: search for folders and if NO visible item is in it then print it to the shell.

I don't think find can do this, i rather have the feeling that this is doable with regular expressions, at which I have no clue about tbh.

Has someone an idea to accomplish this task?

Maybe it would be better to start a new thread for this question, but anyway, here goes.

1. Search for any directory

2. If directory contains any non-dot files, skip it (= mark for keeping).

3. Otherwise, print it.

Code:

find -type d -print |
while read dir; do
  keep=false
  for file in "$dir"/*; do
    case $file in
      "$dir"/.*) continue;;  # redundant?  see below
      # "$dir"/\*) continue;;  # maybe need this too, depend on globbing settings
      *) keep=true; break;;
    esac
  done
  if ! $keep; then
    echo "$dir"
  fi
done

Maybe radoulov can come up with an elegant one-liner for this; it's not particularly succinct.

This just echoes the directories; if it seems to work for you, you can change the echo to rm -rf

If your shell doesn't expand non-matching wildcards to an empty string, you might need the case which I commented out, too. (Actually maybe the .* case is redundant; wildcards don't expand dotfiles in bash at least.)

Yeah I had to uncomment the second 'dir-line' and it's working as far as i tested it. Thanks buddy! I'm pretty amazed by how easy it can(!) be if one is good at bash scripting skills. I have to learn more, but this gave me confidence to get better and better.